


For the Long Haul

by battle_cat



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Caretaking, Comfort Sex, Coping Mechanisms, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Sexual Content, Trauma Management for Immortals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:54:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25819138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: In the aftermath of escaping the lab, everyone deals in the ways they know how to.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 61
Kudos: 549





	For the Long Haul

By the time they reach the unassuming block of flats in Tower Hamlets, the momentary swoop of relief at having escaped the lab is gone, and Joe is practically vibrating with unspent adrenaline. He spends most of the trip alternating between not looking at Booker, not looking at the blood-soaked hem of Andy’s t-shirt, and trying to shake the image of Nicky’s brains on the floor that keeps playing in his head.

The small mission of finding the key to the flat—still hidden exactly where they’d left it nearly three years ago, the last time they’d been here—is a welcome distraction.

They are all covered in blood. There’s nothing for it but to walk into the building and slip quietly up the stairs, counting themselves lucky to encounter no one. This isn’t the tax bracket where anyone invests in security cameras, which is exactly why they chose the place.

It isn’t the Charlie safe house, made warm and familiar with books and a full spice cabinet and a bootleg satellite hookup Booker had arranged during the 1986 World Cup. This is a shell, somewhere they can go to ground until it’s safe to try to leave the country.

Inside, the routines of landing in a new place take over with hardly any of them needing to speak. Booker turns on the gas and electricity with the self-installed kill switches the power company definitely does not know about. Nicky checks the water and wipes a thick layer of dust from the kitchen counter. Andy starts pulling the plastic off the furniture, and after a moment Nile jumps in and helps.

Joe, momentarily at a loss, settles for opening windows. The air in the flat is thick and stale, and they all absolutely reek of blood. He goes from room to room and opens every window wide, because he needs to do something to stop thinking about the fact that Andy is mortal and Booker betrayed them and he watched that _motherfucker_ put his gun in Nicky’s mouth and pull the trigger and he wasn’t fast enough to stop it—

He gives himself a moment, in the barely-furnished bedroom that is their bedroom when they stay here, to take a few deep breaths and try to get the adrenaline still surging through his bloodstream under control. Their bodies may heal preternaturally but they still react as mortal human bodies do to stress and danger. They have learned, over the years, how to be patient with them.

 _You know how to do this,_ he reminds himself. _Just do the routines._ The self-soothing rhythms they all have, half-acknowledged, to come down from battle and remind the body that it is safe now. Take a breath. Take a shower. Get out of stinking clothes. Eat something. Take care of someone else. Simple things to get you out of your head and remind you that you’ve survived, and everyone else has too.

“Hey.”

He jumps. Nicky is in the doorway. He knows, by now, that there is no way not to startle Joe when it’s like this. But he still tries to do it as softly as possible.

Nicky nods his head toward the bathroom down the hall. “Andy said we get the shower first.”

They leave their clothes in a bloody heap in the easily-washable plastic hamper that’s there in the bathroom for that purpose. Whatever can be salvaged will be sorted out later.

As soon as they step under the spray, Nicky pulls him close, pressing their foreheads together. “Hey,” he murmurs, slipping into Arabic as easily as he does so many things that matter a great deal. “It’s okay, right? We’re okay.” Nicky’s fingers sink into his hair, and he is clutching at him wherever he can reach, at his shoulder and his wrist where Nicky’s hand is curled around the back of his neck.

“I don’t like watching you die.” He’s seen it dozens of times now. Some times rattle him more than others.

“I know.”

“He put the gun in your _mouth_ —” It makes his stomach churn.

“I know, I know. But I’m okay now. I’m right here.” And then he’s folding up the space between them and kissing him, soft and sweet and barely enough (it will never be enough) and it would almost be coy except for the way he nips at Joe’s bottom lip before he pulls back.

The water dripping down the line of his jaw is pink-tinged. “Here, let me…” Joe turns him around under the spray and scrubs the matted gore out of his hair, fingers catching on bone chips and tacky-stiff clots of dried blood. It’s gross, but he can do it, when maybe a moment ago he couldn’t have.

They scrub each other clean with quiet attention, and then Joe can’t resist pulling him in to kiss him some more, heady and deep this time, pressed body to body with his fingers digging in to the muscles of Nicky’s back.

“They’ll kill us if we use up all the hot water,” Nicky finally mumbles against his lips, and he’s able to laugh about it, and that’s a good sign.

By the time Nile has showered and put some concentrated effort into shoving down the sense-memory of what sure as hell felt like every bone in her body breaking and then re-knitting itself, someone has laid out a clean t-shirt and a well-worn leather jacket on the bed in the apartment’s small second bedroom. Her jeans are dark enough that any lingering stains won’t be noticeable at a glance, and while she’s starting to really regret shooting a hole in a perfectly good pair of combat boots, a little duct tape will cover the evidence for now.

Joe is standing by the door when she comes back into the living room. Andy looks like she hasn’t moved from where she settled herself gingerly on the couch, but she has somehow acquired a bottle of whiskey. Booker had gone out to the small concrete balcony with a pack of cigarettes almost as soon as they arrived and hasn’t returned.

“Could use a walk. I’ll get food,” Joe says. “Any preferences?”

“Mm, the good Bengali place. If it’s still open,” Andy says from her spot on the couch.

“Andy needs medical supplies,” Nile says. Andy has wiped her face and neck clean but the bottom corner of her shirt is dark and sticky with drying blood. She winces when Andy sits next to her and peels back the hem of her shirt, but she doesn’t stop her.

“I’m fine,” Andy says, because of course she does. The wound has long since bled through the perfunctory dressing that someone had put on it in the lab.

“Yeah, why do I think your medical knowledge was last updated some time in the fourteenth century?” She gives the soaked dressing a careful poke, but messing with it too much doesn’t seem like a good idea.

“I fucking hated the fourteenth century,” Andy grumbles. Then: “Nicky has a medical degree.”

“From when?”

“1870…something,” Nicky says from the kitchen, where he’s taking stock of the bare cabinets. “After your civil war.”

Okay, she’s gonna have to circle back to that one later. “That might not be totally useless,” she says for now.

“Do you know what to get?” Joe asks.

“Kinda? I learned combat first aid in basic.”

Joe grabs a black leather jacket from a peg by the door. “Come with me, then. There’s a pharmacy a few streets over.”

Joe walks fast. She is used to keeping up with men while wearing forty pounds of gear and not complaining, but it’s still an effort with his long strides. But it’s also not a bad way to burn off the lingering energy of the fight, and she’s pretty sure that’s the reason both of them are doing it.

She wants to ask about Booker, what will happen to him now, but she’s absolutely certain that’s the last thing Joe wants to talk about. So they don’t say anything for a few minutes.

It’s early evening now, and cool enough she’s glad for the jacket, which she’s now certain is Andy’s jacket. Joe stuffs his hands in his own coat pockets, and then something on his face shifts, melting into the softest, sweetest smile. He pulls a small scrap of paper out of his pocket and unfolds it. It’s a hastily-written note in Arabic, scribbled on the back of a crumped receipt.

“What’s that?” Nile asks.

“He leaves little notes for me, in places where I’ll find them later. It’s…sort of a game we have, ever since I taught him to write Arabic.” He looks down at the note with a soft laugh. “Eight hundred years of practice and his penmanship is still shit.”

“What’s it say?”

“Stay safe, my soul.” He traces the words with his thumb as he reads them. “And get the fish curry.” He folds the note back up, carefully, reverently, and tucks it into an inside pocket where it won’t get lost.

He’s quiet for a block or two after that, contemplative.

“Do you worry about him, when you go into a fight?” she asks after a minute. She’s not sure, if it would be better or worse, having the person you loved most in the world beside you on the front lines. She doesn’t know if she could bear it.

“He is quite capable of taking care of himself,” Joe says. And then, after a breath: “But yes. Every time.”

They’ve made their way to a commercial street a few blocks away, lined with curry places and South Asian shops, before she realizes something incredibly obvious. “Shit. I don’t have any money.” She doesn’t have an ATM card, a credit card; she doesn’t even have her passport. She has nothing.

“We’ll take care of all that,” Joe says with a wave of his hand. “Don’t worry about it.”

They stop at an ATM and Joe thumbs through half a dozen bank cards before he finds the one he wants. He withdraws a large stack of cash, puts a few bills into his pocket and hands Nile three crisp twenty-pound notes.

“That enough for what Andy needs?”

“Yeah. Should be more than enough.”

He hands over the rest of the fat stack of bills. “That’s for you. Until we get your bank account set up and everything.”

She thumbs through the stack with growing shock. “Joe…this is five hundred pounds. I can’t take this—” But he’s already holding up a hand to forestall any protest.

“When we do jobs that pay, we all get equal shares. Until then…Nicky and I have more than enough. We take care of anyone on the team when they need it. You need something, just ask us.”

“I—thank you. I’ll pay it back, as soon as—”

“It’s not a loan, Nile. That’s not how this works. We all look out for each other, and no one makes a big deal of it. That’s how you keep it together for the long haul.” He gives her shoulder a brief squeeze.

She must be exhausted and still raw-nerved from the fight, because she has to swallow past the lump in her throat. “Thank you,” she manages.

“Don’t keep it all in one pocket.”

She rolls her eyes. “I may be new but I wasn’t born yesterday.” This gets a hearty laugh out of him as they continue down the street.

“Wait,” she says after a minute. “There’s bank accounts?”

“Swiss bank accounts.”

“You’re shitting me.”

She goes to the little pharmacy and she buys bandages and gauze and disinfectant, and a thermometer because fever is a sign of sepsis, right? She’s pretty sure about that.

At the Good Bengali Place, which looks no different from half a dozen other unassuming takeout places on the same block, she finds Joe chatting amicably with the man behind the counter in a language she doesn’t recognize. He hands over two big plastic bags brimming with what looks like enough food for ten people.

She dresses Andy’s wound in the cramped apartment bathroom, cleaning and bandaging it as best as she can figure out, and she checks the stab wound in her shoulder for good measure too.

“You have to watch out for infection, now,” she says, wiping blood off the sink countertop. “And you’re not gonna be able to drink like you used to. Unless you wanna be puking with a gut wound.”

Andy responds with a string of words she doesn’t know in a language that might not be spoken anymore, but they’re definitely swear words.

They eat from takeout containers and paper plates, crowded around the small kitchen table. There’s chicken and lamb and vegetables and rice, but the fish curry really is the star. Booker hardly speaks, and he drinks quite a lot, but he gets a plate like everyone else.

After dinner the exhaustion is clearly hitting everyone. Nicky and Joe disappear to one of the bedrooms. Andy stretches herself out with a grimace on the living room couch, next to the recliner where Booker is barely focusing on some reality show where contestants complete absurd tasks, the volume turned down low, nursing a tumbler of whiskey from the bottle Andy left on the table. “You can take the second bedroom,” Andy tells her, nodding to the door off the living room. “I’ll stay out here.”

“You sure?”

Andy scoots a little further down the couch, wincing as she finds a comfortable position. “Yeah. Get some sleep.”

In the small bedroom, her boot clinks against something under the bed. It’s a vodka bottle. Ah. So this is normally Andy’s room. Through some urge she doesn’t quite understand, she leaves the door open a little.

It’s only there, staring up at the cracked plaster ceiling just barely illuminated by the glow of the TV, that she can’t hold back certain thoughts. About how this is real; this is her life now, as an…immortal fugitive mercenary? For good? Something like that. Whatever she is, she burned the last bridge she had back to any kind of normal life when she walked into the lab with a gun. This is it.

If she starts down the road of thinking about her family—how she’ll never hear her mom sing in church again or laugh herself into hiccups with her brother over some dumb inside joke—grief and terror rises like ice water threatening to drown her. No. She can’t do that right now.

There are things they teach you in basic training about handling stress, and then there are other, more useful things the women in her unit had taught each other, for when panic or flashbacks or anger got too much, and you couldn’t deal with it by working out until you exhausted yourself. There was a grounding exercise—five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can touch…something like that. She’s not sure if she’s remembering the order right, but she’s got the basic idea.

She starts with the cracks in the ceiling plaster. The blue strip of light from the TV. Her boots by the foot of the bed. The chipped second-hand dresser in the corner of the room. Andy’s leather jacket, over the back of the chair.

Right, okay, this is good. She is already feeling a little better. Four things she can hear.

The muted sound of the live studio audience, laughing while some reality contestant embarrasses themselves. Booker and Andy having a quiet, halting conversation—it sounds like French, but she can’t hear enough to make out the words. Nicky and Joe—well, they are very clearly having sex in the other bedroom; they are doing an admirable job of trying to be quiet but the walls are thin. She hastily searches for another sound. Settles on the stereo blasting hip-hop, somewhere outside the open window. Cardi B, she picks out after a minute. It’s so ordinary she wants to laugh. The world goes on.

This is a pretty good exercise, she thinks. She should teach it to the team.

Before she gets all the way through three things she can touch, she falls asleep.

Andy shifts a little on the couch, resolutely telling herself she does not regret giving Nile the bed. The kid deserves a little time to herself after everything she’s rolled with in the past few days.

She’ll make better use of it than Andy would, anyway. She is bone-weary and everything, absolutely _everything_ hurts, but she hasn’t been a good sleeper for a long time. Usually, her solution is to stay up getting absolutely sauced with Booker until one or both of them nods off. It is not a healthy coping mechanism; she is well aware of that. But at least they’re doing it together and not alone.

One truly embarrassing drunken encounter in 1832 had taught them that they were not well matched as sex partners. But they had sometimes shared a bed, both of them curled in on themselves pressed back to back, and it seemed to help a little. When they stayed in this flat, they shared the bed Nile is currently sleeping in. At least that way neither of them had to stumble very far to find a bottle.

But right now Nile is in the bedroom, and Booker is out here, so she is out here too.

“Andy,” he offers after some time. She can tell by the slur in his voice he is deep into his cups, at the phase of the evening where he can only remember French. “I am so sorry.”

“Don’t,” she said quietly, because they both know it’s too late for that, and it’s only going to make whatever comes next harder.

“You have to believe…I didn’t know what they would do to Joe and Nicky…I didn’t know about that…”

Privately, she thinks he didn’t _want_ to know. But she says, “I believe you.”

“Whatever I have to do to make it right”—his voice cracks on the last word—“I’ll do it.”

“You know it’s not up to just me. You know that.”

“Yeah.” It’s dark, and she’s not quite facing him, but she can tell from the sound he’s drinking straight from the bottle. “I know.”

“You should sleep.”

Their bedroom has a little charity-shop end table, and Joe rummages through the shallow drawer until he finds what he’s looking for. “Aha!” He holds up the half-empty tube of lube in triumph. “Not even expired.” He tosses it on the bed with a wink.

“Come here, love.” Nicky says it in Genoese, the first language in which he ever whispered desperate yearnings against his skin, gasped out exclamations and delicious blasphemies as they moved together in those first times. He is wearing that soft private little smile of his, like he has a secret and it is the best secret in the history of the world.

They are in the middle of the small room, kissing and rocking into each other, hands sinking into hair and seeking out skin under clothes, undressing each other piece by piece with the ease of long familiarity. Nicky backs him up step by step, slow and methodical, and by the time the backs of his legs brush the mattress they are both naked and he is helpless with want.

Nicky…Nicky has the unerring ability to do this _thing,_ to figure out how fast Joe wants to go and then make them go a step slower than that. It is _maddening_ in the best possible way and Nicky knows _exactly_ what the full intensity of his patient, focused attention does to Joe, and he deploys it with a kind of ruthless glee.

Tonight it feels like more than a tease, though. It’s a reminder. _We can go slow. I will always be here with you. I will always come back to you. We have time. We have time. We have time._

“Ssh,” Nicky murmurs as he pushes him back on the bed, and this is part of the game too. Truly no one in the flat would begrudge them this, but they share a wall with the other bedroom and the insulation is shit, and this is part of the challenge, holding in the tension to the breaking point, smothering cries in kisses and heaving breaths and mouths pressed to sweat-damp skin.

Nicky spends an unbearable amount of time working him open, teasing him with slick fingers until he resorts to whispered swearing in his native tongue. Which was apparently the target Nicky was aiming for, because he rewards him by sliding into him so slowly, and after centuries of study at this art he knows exactly the right angle and pace and hotly-whispered words to take him apart tonight, and send himself over the edge a few ragged breaths after.

Afterward, they lie in a tangle of heavy limbs and cooling sweat, his hand cupped around the back of Nicky’s head, where the bone is unshattered and he can feel the living warmth underneath his tousled hair.

In a moment, Nicky will get up and get a towel to clean them up, and then they’ll fall asleep with his face tucked against the back of Nicky’s neck, and in the morning they will have to deal with plans and consequences and mortality and the future. But for now, his love, his soul, his life is a warm, steadily-breathing weight on top of him, and he can finally, finally believe they’re safe.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [Tumblr!](http://fuckyeahisawthat.tumblr.com)


End file.
